- Title: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! – Watch Out! The Willawaw!
- wiki: link
Flashback Friday takes us back to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! for another mystery involving some meddling kids and their talking dog. The first episode of the show’s Third Season, “Watch Out! The Willawaw!” isn’t the strongest episode of the series. Gone is the music montage and the multi-door hallway gag. The creature is also a bit disappointing in a giant glowing owl (complimented by two cohorts in full-sized owl costumes) that lacks the pop of several other mystery monsters the group comes upon. We do get a trap that works as planned, a rarity in the series, except that it traps Shaggy (Casey Kasem) and Scooby-Doo (Don Messick) rather than the villains leading to a twist on the show’s unmasking sequence.
The plot of the episode involves Mystery, Inc. visiting Velma‘s (Pat Stevens) uncle who turns up missing. His role as a border officer certainly comes with more baggage today than when the show originally aired. Discovering a horde of stolen goods helps offer insight to the mystery, although there’s quite a bit of exposition at the end necessary to explain aspects of the plot that were a bit lost in favor of all the shots of the flying owl zooming one way or the other but not doing much else. Velma’s uncle just magically appears at the end, having been found and rescued off camera by other characters (in a bit of an odd turn as the search for him, not the investigation of the Willawaw, was the point of the episode).
